The Hell Centre

When I was a young child I thought that the building where you visited the doctor was called “The Hell Centre”.

It wasn’t that I had a particularly negative view of the medical profession: my mum was a nursing sister who worked in the hospital next door. Neither did I associate “The Hell Centre” with any fire-and-brimstone images that I might have had of hell.

It was just that I had mis-heard the pronunciation of “health centre”—the ‘th’ sound had run into the ‘s’ of ‘centre’: hell thcentre—and so I just accepted that that was what it was called, in the same way that I had accepted that an apple was an apple and a cat was a cat.

I sometimes wish I could still accept things that easily without questioning them. I wonder why that is…

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Gareth Saunders

I’m Gareth J M Saunders, 46 years old, 6′ 4″, father of 3 boys (including twins).
Latterly, web architect and agile project manager at the University of St Andrews and warden at Agnes Blackadder Hall. Currently on sabbatical.
I am a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and I sing with the NYCGB alumni choir.
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